recommended JVM version

[Cantor, Scott]

On 7/23/15, 5:01 PM, "users on behalf of IAM David Bantz" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of dabantz at alaska.edu> wrote:

>I've been handed a new server for our v2 IdP;
>the current production environment has been RHEL 5.11, Tomcat 6.0.16, Oracle Java 1.60;
>this new production environment is RHEL 6.6, Tomcat 7.0.33 and Open JVM 1.5 which the Sibb documentation strongly urges me to replace with Oracle's "standard" JVM.

Can't be 1.5, that would be Java 5...

>However the Shibb documentation does not specify a version.

Well, the current IdP version does. The requirements page for 3.0 is being carefully maintained.

IdPv2 supports Java 6, 7, and 8. There's a fundamental issue we don't have an answer to, when do we stop supporting one of them? The SP policy is to stop support when free or at least "standard" support for the OS stops. By that policy, we would now be supporting only 8. Since that's not really the case right now, I don't have an answer, but the current situation isn't viable. We can't get fixes from Oracle (we're not paying, this is an open source project, that's not reasonable to expect) so that leaves OpenJDK, and its memory leaks and weird nonsense.

> I see lots of messages on this list indicting use of 7, while only a few using current 8 and those indicating problems, indicating a scripting problem resolved by reverting to Java 7 and part of the Shibb installation instructions for memory superceded.

The scripting differences are documented exhasutively and you can always use Rhino on Java 8 and retain compatibility for older scripts. I'm inclined to see us start bundling Rhino in the next IdP patch if we move to Java 8. But it is what it is, you can use either scripting engine on 8 regardless. That's not a factor. I don't know what memory thing you're talking about.

>So should I deploy the current Oracle Java 8 (which Oracle describes as major and "revolutionary" upgrade), or stick with the older tried-and-true still-available Java 7 for a refreshed IdP 2.4.4 using a lot of scripted attributes from my Java 6 environment?

Java 7 is EOL. Using Oracle's is therefore not really an option unless you have extended support. If you want to use OpenJDK from a vendor, I've said my peace on that in the wiki. It is "supported", but personally I'm not spending my time debugging weird issues on it anymore. We'll fix issues we can fix that are specific to it, but if you're asking me personally, I'd use Java 8.

Full disclosure, I'm on 7 and will be moving to Jetty 9.3 and 8 probably next month. Using Rhino because I'm not rewriting all my scripts.

-- Scott